


Wind-Thrown

by fellowshipper



Category: Charmed
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Unchanged Future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-01
Updated: 2013-08-01
Packaged: 2017-12-22 01:32:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/907318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fellowshipper/pseuds/fellowshipper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the original, unchanged future, Wyatt reflects on everything he has – and everything he’s lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wind-Thrown

It wasn’t always like this. Some days that’s the hardest thing to wrap his head around. Before the legions of demons under his command, before the Elders retreated to the eternal safety of their own realm, before his home was transformed into a tourist attraction complete with a tacky gift shop, life was . . . well, maybe not good, but acceptable. He still had his family, his parents, his aunts, too many little cousins to count. He still had Chris. And that’s the kicker. He did all this for him, for them, and Chris just keeps throwing it back in his face like he should be ashamed of himself for some reason. 

Wyatt never wanted this. Not really. But he’d watched as his beloved family members were picked off, one right after the other, one loss never really being properly handled before he had to cope with the next one, and eventually the overwhelming grief and helplessness turned hard, settled into his blood and made him colder. Stronger. Better. Chris didn’t get that, but he was young – and yet so much older than Wyatt in lots of different ways the elder Halliwell had never quite understood. There was a keen wisdom in Chris’s eyes, playfulness and a frightening sharp intelligence that Wyatt watched disappear over the years as it was replaced with sadness and disbelief. Wyatt wanted to get it back. He wanted to get his brother back, all of him, and if Chris couldn’t see that everything Wyatt had done was for him. . . 

The world lay in ruins, a smoking, hollowed out testament to the final battle between good and evil, and while it looked like something straight out a post-apocalyptic movie, that wasn’t what Wyatt had ever wanted, not even for a moment. He didn’t expect rainbows and blue birds, exactly, but he’d never wanted such a constant, dismal reminder of his failures, either. He’d never wanted the world (or what was left of it) thrown into shades of hazy gray. He’d just wanted something different, something that could keep him safe, keep Chris safe, and maybe let them just live together when the entire world seemed to conspire to tear them apart. 

When Piper died, Wyatt had refused to let Chris out of his sight for longer than a few seconds at a time. He stayed with his younger brother, keeping vigil at his bedside for weeks to fight off the invisible demons in Chris’s nightmares, and the real ones that occasionally crept through the shadows to finish the job. He vowed that he would make things right. He would protect Chris. 

When Paige died a few months later, Wyatt kept his promise to himself, hovering permanently at Chris’s side to prevent a similar fate from befalling him. This time, however, he would often sneak into the attic while Chris was sleeping and pore through the Book of Shadows, summoning one demon after another and vanquishing them all without remorse. 

When Phoebe died at the end of that very long, torturous year, when Chris’s sanity was frayed beyond hope and he seemed ready to come apart at the seams, Wyatt still remained at his side. Neither of them ever mentioned why Chris would sometimes wake up with Wyatt curled around him, a hand still snarled in Chris’s dark hair. They were teenagers, fifteen and seventeen. Chris was too old to keep relying on his big brother to protect him from monsters in the darkness, but the monsters were very real and they were very intent on hurting Chris, and Wyatt couldn’t allow that, not when they only had each other. It was a learned silence, just like Chris learned not to mention it when Wyatt’s wardrobe began to steadily be replaced with all black clothing, the better to hide bloodstains from the demons he went chasing during the night. Chris learned not to question the crazed look in his brother’s eyes every time a demon attacked at the house, the disturbing amount of satisfaction Wyatt took in twisting Excalibur as painfully in his victims as he could, the way he kept coming up with increasingly horrific vanquishing potions that were designed to torture before they actually killed. 

Wyatt did it all for him, and yet it’s still not enough. 

Wyatt still remembers the horror in Chris’s eyes, the tension written in every line of his face, when he watched Wyatt kill that first mortal. Chris . . . didn’t understand. Wyatt had sheltered him since Piper’s death, and he blamed himself for Chris’s apparent refusal to accept the world the way it really was. He didn’t understand that the black and white morals they had been raised to believe in were precisely what had gotten their family killed. Mortals were, if not always good, at least not their responsibility to punish. The rules of magic and the rules of mortals were not interchangeable, and the Charmed Ones only had the duty to protect the world from demons. But this mortal, this . . . creature, was one Wyatt failed to recognize as deserving any kind of pity or mercy. The man had betrayed them, consorted with the demons who attacked the Manor on that otherwise uneventful fall day. He had indirectly led to their mother’s brutal murder. Wyatt saw no reason to spare him. The man was incinerated in seconds, turned to ash from the powerful blasts emanating from Wyatt’s palms, and all Chris could do for several long moments was stare in open-mouthed shock. When he looked up, he had the expression of one stunned into abject terror, and when he finally spoke, his voice was soft and barely audible, his words tripping along his tongue as he struggled with his thoughts. 

Wyatt had been expecting one of Chris’s patented moralizing lectures, but he had never anticipated the fear shaking Chris’s voice or the crushing disappointment dripping from every word. He’d done a good thing, though, helped avenge their mother’s death in some small but symbolic way, but the more he tried to explain his reasoning, the wider Chris’s eyes got and the quicker he stepped back toward the door, finally throwing his hands out and barely choking out an order for Wyatt to stay away from him before he stormed down the hall. 

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Wyatt was the most powerful magical creature in existence, possibly since time began. He knew he could stop all the fighting, the endless, pointless struggle between good and evil, wrong and right. He was tired, so very, very tired, and his family – the memory of his family – deserved more. Chris was supposed to be at his side during the final battle, just like when they were children. They were invincible, far stronger together than individually, but Chris simply couldn’t let go of the past. He wouldn’t allow himself to see the truth, choosing instead to cling to Piper’s overly idealistic teachings as though they would help him cling to the woman herself. Wyatt knew better. He knew that her righteousness and her never-failing martyrdom were what had ultimately secured her death, and Chris seemed intent to follow her example right down to the early, violent demise. They played by imaginary rules, never once taking into account that their enemies were by no means bound to the same. 

Chris was supposed to help him, to stay by his side and rule with him. How were they supposed to prevent evil if they couldn’t control it? And how could they control it when they were themselves divided? Wyatt killed the new Source and assumed the mantle himself, and while he took no joy in the coronation that followed, he still couldn’t help but be wounded by Chris’s total refusal to participate. The demons brought a virgin to kneel at the altar, a mortal woman who probably wasn’t even out of her teenage years, and though Wyatt felt sick, he nonetheless completed the ceremony by slitting her throat and spilling her blood over the black marble. He hoisted the athame into the air, still dripping, and felt a surge of awful pride as he was cheered; Chris watched with hard, cold eyes before simply turning on his heel and walking out of the chamber, unnoticed by the ecstatic demons celebrating a new king. 

Wyatt kept the girl’s necklace and wore it around his own neck, without first bothering to wash the blood from it. It dried to form a curious patina and Wyatt decided he liked the pendant better that way.

“We can do this,” he told Chris that night, after the feast, after the party had disbanded, when he was alone in his new quarters, when Chris sat atop the first step of the throne’s dais. Wyatt leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at the back of his brother’s head as though he could will Chris to look at him. He could have, actually, but that wasn’t the point. 

“This is the only way we can control them and keep them from hurting anyone else. You know that.” 

He saw Chris’s shoulders tighten, and he sighed and dropped his head, dragging his hands through his hair. It needed cut. 

“I’m only trying to protect you, Chris. I can’t – I won’t lose you, too.” 

Chris said nothing, just got to his feet and stormed off, leaving Wyatt to slump back into the chill of his throne. He flexed his hand, noticed dried blood still caked in the creases between his fingers and along his knuckles. With a flick of his fingers and a thought, he set a nearby guard on fire and watched him burn, screaming in agony until he was vanquished entirely. And still, Wyatt felt nothing but disappointment. 

 

It doesn’t occur to Wyatt that things are spiraling out of control until he wakes up one night to the sound of shrieks and explosions just outside his private quarters. 

Immediately spurred to action, he hurries out of bed and throws the broad doors open without bothering to dress first, quickly assessing the situation and then just as quickly deciding that the situation is incredibly dire. He constructed his domain in the Underworld to be as similar to an aboveground dwelling as possible, some small reminder of a life long gone (and, if he’s being honest with himself, for simple, sentimental nostalgia, and to make Chris more comfortable); the entire complex is on fire, smoke choking the corridors and flames barreling unnaturally fast down the halls to engulf everything they touch. Demons of every sort, even those naturally predisposed to fight one another, are struggling to escape and fight off the intruders, obscured as they are by the thick smoke and haze of the fire. 

Wyatt brings both hands up and squeezes the fingers in toward the palms, calling upon his mother’s powers to stop the commotion around him. The hall instantly plunges into silence, the flames frozen in place, but movement still catches his eye. 

“Chris?” he calls, squinting through the smoke to make out the familiar shape at the end of the hall. “Are you okay?” 

Chris gives a manic grin, one Wyatt can’t recall seeing on him before, plunges an athame into a frozen demon, grabs onto the wrists of two other strangers who were halted in mid-stride by Wyatt’s powers, and then disappears in a cloud of blue orbs.

Wyatt watches, bewildered, uncaring as the freeze lifts and everything snaps back into motion, as the demons continue running and abandoning their duties in search of safety, as his makeshift home – the home he constructed for Chris – burns down around him. 

It’s not supposed to be like this. 

That’s the last Wyatt hears or sees of Chris for weeks afterward, at least directly. Indirectly, Chris is far from subtle; every other day sees a new surge of rebellion in different parts of the city, small, futile skirmishes that are little else but annoyances, but every one of them is a dagger to Wyatt’s already tattered heart. 

“I did this for you,” he cries, eyes blurry with sudden tears, when Chris is caught and brought before him, pushed to his knees and held there. Bianca stands behind him, her hand twisted up in his hair, pulling him back at an unnatural angle to force him to look up at Wyatt. He shows no fear, only anger and betrayal, and Wyatt strikes him for it. 

“Do you understand? I did this – I did all of this for you! For us!” 

Chris spits blood onto Wyatt’s boots and looks back up at him, green eyes wild with rage, and Wyatt growls low in his chest and closes his hand around his younger brother’s throat, squeezing with just enough force to be a threat.

“I gave up everything for you,” he half-whispers, voice hoarse with disbelief and barely contained fury. “I wanted to keep you safe, and I did, and this is how you repay me? I did this for you!”

Chris strains under Wyatt’s hand and Bianca’s fingers held tight in his hair, flashing another grin wholly unlike him, lips pulled back until it’s more of a snarl than anything, teeth stained red with blood from his split lip.

“You did this for yourself, Wyatt. You wanted power. You wanted demons. You got ‘em. Maybe they can save you; I sure as hell couldn’t.” 

“You’ve gone insane. Chris, let me help –”

“You’ve done enough already. You wanted a war.”

“Not with you!”

“It was always with me. You wanted to lash out at everything good, and you thought you could keep everything evil away just by keeping it under your thumb, but all you’re doing is destroying everything around you, good and evil. Don’t you get it? There will be nothing left, Wyatt. Nothing.”

Wyatt blinks, feels hot tears spill onto his face, and he doesn’t try to stop them or hide them. 

“You’re a murderer, Wyatt. You’re crazy, power-hungry, and a killer. And you can kill me now –”

“Chris, no.” 

“—and there’ll be ten more who’ll take my place. I’d rather die fighting than live like this, and I’m not the only one.”

Wyatt steps back as though physically hit, waves dismissively to indicate that Bianca should haul Chris away and back to his holding cell. The massive throne room still feels too small, like it’s closing in on him as he drops down onto the dais, staring at his open hands as if they might hold the answers to questions he doesn’t know how to ask. 

That night, he makes Chris watch a gruesome execution of several rebels caught along with him, pleads with him to give up whatever foolish point he’s trying to prove (“All will be forgiven,” he promises, even as he’s covered up to the elbows in the blood of Chris’s allies). Chris stares at him, through him, and promises violent revenge in return. 

The rebel war, if it can even be called that, is merely one of attrition. The rebels hide like rats in alleys and in whatever hole they can find, and they lose great numbers in raids on demon posts. They’re all suicidal, Wyatt thinks, and it’s almost pity that stays his hand when they breach his compound and free Chris – with Bianca’s help, because not even a hardened assassin is immune to the urge to protect Chris, it seems. 

Months later, the bond he’s always shared with Chris, no matter how much time and energy Chris has spent recently trying to sever it, is abruptly cut off. It’s not that Wyatt can read Chris’s mind or feel his emotions or anything of the sort; it’s just a subtle warmth in the back of his mind, a reassurance that Chris is alive and well. It blinks out one day without warning, startling Wyatt so badly he stumbles into a table in mid-stride. Tamping down the panic settling into his gut, he demands one of his lieutenants to bring him a status report on any recent Rebellion activity; there’s nothing out of the ordinary, leaving Wyatt with no other choice but to consult the Book of Shadows to determine what’s happened. Except the Book is no longer safe in his chambers, and when he casts a spell to return it, it drops onto the podium already opened to the page of a spell that isn’t even supposed to work. He and Chris wrote it as boys, as a prank for some unsuspecting future witch to unwittingly fall for, and Wyatt’s hand trembles as his fingertips glide over the words written in a childish scrawl. 

Chris has sent himself back in time for reasons Wyatt can only begin to fathom, clearly having pulled from the power of their ancestral home and the generations of witches in their family in order to make the impossible spell actually work. 

It was never supposed to be this way, Wyatt thinks, jaw clenching as he storms into the hall and starts demanding minions to find Bianca and bring her to him. If he can’t reason with Chris, he’ll have to get more creative with his persuasion. 

He waits, and he worries, and somewhere deep in his bones, he knows, finally, that it was always going to end this way.


End file.
